TED DROZDOWSKI

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King Sunny Adé still brings the beats King Sunny Adé's music is bubbly as a tonic — a percolating, pop-infused update of the traditional Yoruba sound. "My songs are made to lift worries, so people can be happy and dance their troubles away," declares the 62-year-old Nigerian world-music star.

Dirt Farmer Music/Vanguard Helm's 2007 Dirt Farmer won the Best Traditional Folk Album Grammy for its acoustic arrangements of songs plucked from the Delta soil of the Band drummer and singer's rural Arkansas youth.

Easy Star (2009) A dub-wise version of the Beatles' classic album seems a novelty concept, but this madly entertaining disc is a buoyant tribute to the flexibility of the Fab Four's open-ended vision of pop, as well as the low-tech sonic trickery perfected in Jamaica's famed Studio One.

Anti- (2009) The country-blues songbook as written by Son House, Blind Willie Johnson, Mississippi John Hurt, and Charley Patton seems like natural, if previously unexplored, territory for this folk legend.

The Blind Boys of Alabama and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band The double bill of the Blind Boys of Alabama and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band at Symphony Hall on Friday is a match made in New Orleans.

Fred Frith and Cosa Brava try songs for a change It's no surprise that Fred Frith, who's one of the world's leading improvising musicians and a wildly inventive composer, would form a group called Cosa Brava.